Bruins 'weren't ready' for Leafs' desperation in Game 5

BOSTON – The Toronto Maple Leafs did everything a team on
the brink of elimination is supposed to do Friday night.

They blocked shots, they won puck battles, and they almost never
had a dip in energy in a 2-1 Game 5 win, staving off elimination
and setting up a Game 6 in Toronto Sunday night.

The Bruins, on the other hand, did almost none of the things a
team looking to clinch a series ought to do. They didn’t
score first – Tyler Bozak put the Leafs up 1-0 midway through
the second period. They didn’t score on the power play, and
in fact gave up the Bozak goal while enjoying the man-advantage off
a James van Riemsdyk interference call. And they came out with
little to no intensity, save for the first two or three shifts of
the game.

“We had a couple of good shifts right at the start of the
game, and then after the [tripping] penalty to [Chris] Kelly (1:46
into the game), they just took it over from there, [for] the rest
of the first,” coach Claude Julien said. “Second
period, a little bit better, but definitely not close to what we
needed to win this game tonight, and as you saw, the third period
was more like our team.

“If there’s anything to understand from this,
it’s that we’ve got to play three periods like we did
in the third. We expect to close this off.”

After the first period, the Leafs held a whopping 19-8 shot
advantage. Even as the Bruins surpassed the Leafs in shots, they
rarely had any attempts from the grade-A area in front of James
Reimer’s net.

That’s not to take anything away from Reimer, who was
marvelous in making 43 stops on 44 shots. He had a couple of
stunners on Patrice Bergeron, including the save of the series
midway through the second, when Adam McQuaid found Bergeron alone
off Reimer’s right hip, and seemingly all the Bruin center
had to do was redirect the puck to a wide-open net.

But Reimer, like his teammates in front of him, played desperate
hockey, and the stop on Bergeron was the perfect example. His
spectacular split save earned him the front page of the Saturday
Toronto Star, and kept the game scoreless long enough for Bozak to
break the ice.

“The playoffs take different twists and turns, and as a
young goaltender he’s been presented with a lot of
pressure,” Leafs coach Randy Carlyle said of Reimer.
“And you can see the growth of a hockey player and
specifically a goaltender that’s finding this way and
learning some of the intricacies of playoff hockey, and the
experience should be real valuable to him as it should be to all of
our young players.”

As incredible as Reimer’s performance was, though, the
fact that he rarely saw any real danger was a big reason he and the
Leafs skated off the TD Garden ice. The Leafs blocked a whopping 27
Boston shots, and that doesn’t include the 15 missed Boston
attempts or the untold number of times the Bruins simply
didn’t get a shot off because a Leaf filled the lane. Of the
18 Leafs skaters, all but six had at least one blocked shot, and
eight had multiple blocks, led by Ryan O’Byrne’s
five.

“Everybody teaches the same thing – if you’re
going through the shooting lane you better be prepared to
sacrifice,” Carlyle said. “And I’ve used that
term ’20 percent,’ that you’ve got to be 20
percent more committed in a lot of areas when it comes to playoff
time, and shot blocking is a huge area. … And it takes
courage to get in those shooting lanes, but you have to be able to
have the people that are prepared to do it night in and night out,
that’s what the playoffs are and that separates
people.”

Right now, all that separates the Bruins and Leafs is one game.
A strong Game 1 and a pair of quality performances in Games 3 and 4
suggest the Bruins are the better team in this series, but Game
2’s loss and Toronto’s dominant first 40 minutes Friday
night are a reminder that the playoffs have a funny way of bringing
out the best in a team – and the worst.

“I think we just weren’t prepared. Maybe we thought
it was going to be a little easier than it was going to be,”
said Brad Marchand, one of three Bruin forwards (Milan Lucic and
Gregory Campbell) who didn’t have a single shot in the game.
“They came out very hard and really put a lot of pressure on
us, and we weren’t ready.”

While Boston fans may want to scream over the idea that the team
wasn’t ready for a game that would have sent it on to the
next round – especially when the elimination of Montreal and
Pittsburgh’s goaltending woes suddenly have the Eastern
Conference title looking a lot more plausible – the Bruins
don’t have time to ponder what went wrong in Game 5.

What they do have time to do is find some of the desperation
that fueled the Leafs Friday night – desperation the Bruins
showed late in the game, when they played their best hockey of the
night.

That 10 minutes of high-quality hockey, however, wasn’t
enough to erase the first 50 minutes of utter malaise.